 |
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Great follow on book and pleased to find it on ebay
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
It’s March 1919, a few short months after the end of First World War. The working class twenty-three year old Riley Purefoy marries Nadine the daughter of Lady and Sir Waveney. No family members are invited as guests only a few friends: Peter Locke as best man, who was Riley’s CO in the army; Rose as maid of honour, Peter’s cousin with ambitions to be a doctor and Peter’s son Tom as pageboy. Rose works at the Queen’s Hospital attending to soldiers with facial injuries and had nursed Riley during his time there. “ Riley’s mouth had for so long been the territory first of bloody destruction, then of its complex rebuilding by surgery...His mouth. The beautiful upper lip, the battlefield below. The skin above smoothed ivory by morphine, the scars below carefully shaven, not hidden, not displayed...” While Riley’s scars of disfigurement received at Passchendale are obvious, Peter Locke’s mental anguish and feelings of profound guilt of having men die under his command is not. While Riley heroically attempts to live a normal life, Peter has become an alcoholic, ignoring his wife Julia and their son Tom and barely leaves his study. There he prefers the company of Homer’s ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ which he religiously reads and rereads. With David Lloyd George’s lie, “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in” ¹ still ringing in their ears those soldiers who returned from the war attempt to find their place again in society. For the women of these men, be they mothers, sisters or wives, they have the unenviable task of finding a way of dealing with the emotionally, physically and mentally scarred survivors of the Great War. The author Louisa Young attempts to convey both sides of that particular battle which will result in casualties on both sides. With 2014 being the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War one can assume it is no serendipitous circumstance that Louisa Young has published this novel now. But this is no attempt to cash in on the anniversary but an honest attempt to convey that though a war may be over and the ink is dry on the various treaties signed by the winners and losers, the suffering of the, ‘the lions led by donkeys’ ², still goes on regardless. The author has written an interesting story and characters and which for the most part are engaging and believable. However, her technique of jumping from third to first person narrator is jarring. The story is specifically told in third person but then jumps to first to convey each character’s internal dialogue. Rather than engaging one in the story this style of writing actually disengages the reader from the story and too often than not the author is showing rather telling the story. Many of Louisa Young’s characters are believable and roundly written especially those of the two combatants, Peter Locke and Riley Purefoy. These two imposingly different male characters coming from polarized ends of the class scale feel bolted and secured in the real world and as such they are easy to not only sympathize with but also to empathize with as much as one can after the horrors they have encountered. However, the female characters are less well drawn especially Peter Locke’s cousin Rose who is not only poorly drawn but is a superfluous character who if excised from the novel would not affect the story or plot in any way. Her actions are at times contradictory. At the end of one chapter she has decided that she will give up her dreams of becoming a doctor to look after a man but in the following chapter she says, “For one thing, I’d have to give up medicine, and that I will not do. Certainly not for a man.” Another problem with the novel regarding womenis that all the mother characters are unsympathetic. Julia, Peter’s wife and Tom’s mother, ignores the boy and leaves them both for Europe. Julia’s mother is a harridan. Riley and Nadine’s mothers practically disown their children after being told of their wedding while the fathers don’t necessarily approve but are seen to understand. While on the whole the dialogue is thoughtfully and skilfully written there are times when it feels unnatural and clunky. Couple that with the author crowbarring in quotes from literature and poetry in particular, which do not help to define or enrich the characterizations of the protagonists but only feels like the author is showing off her erudition, and it results in the reader being all too aware that they are reading a novel. Though this is going to be sold as a story of the aftermath of the Great War and its subsequent consequences for the returning soldiers and their families it is at its solidly written heart, a romance novel. It is a story of love, unrequited and otherwise, and the way that love be it for another person or your country attempts to survive under extraordinary circumstances.Read full review
Verified purchase: No
Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- Best-selling in Books
Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- Save on Books
Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- You may also like
